The picture was so outlandish, I stopped at once during my running tour around Bruges: in all those years I saw painters before their easels on about every rampart, and most around Love Lake, but never here, at this little park, always full of rabbits, next to the canal to Zeebrugge.

When I see a painter at work, my first instinct never is to get a sight of his work in progress. My curiosity is about what he/she is trying to paint: the landscape behind his easel. What triggered his interest, what decided his choice ?

I not even ever tried to paint, but I’m always thinking about judgments as paintings. That way it is easy to consider yourself not a technician, but an artist ;-)

But first of all, of course, judges do not choose their landscapes: they come to us. Never  ‘still lives’, always chaos.

Painters mostly prefer quiet corners, our legal ‘atelier’ is the theatre of screams and curses, sometimes violence, even death.

So why compare the handling of a court case and writing a judgment to painting ?

Because I feel somehow that painters imagine a world that would be better and any way more genuine, than the one in front of them. At least, they try to. They don’t copy, they create.

So do we. And judges also work with colours: the red of passion, the green of money, the yellow of joy, and most of all, the blue of peace.

Painters don’t work at random neither, just on inspiration: their creation is a construction, prepared by fine pencil lines.

My pencil serves humbler goals: foremost to tap with it as to get silence in the court or  to interrupt a lawyer. I very rarely write with it: only underlining, question marks and exclamations !

And something else we (should) have in common: patience. Painters take their time. Hurried judgments are often bad ones. Painting is a question of detail, judgments too.

I might not be the most patient judge by far.  To be fair, my impatience is legendary.That’s where our big difference with (real) artists lies: tribunals have become factories, with ever growing work loads, and impossible Just In Time delivery goals.

So at this moment, most of my last ‘paintings’ are in the final phase. I will add a touch here and  there, and Sorina, the senior secretary of my ‘August Team’ will frame them, ready for delivery, at the latest for my last  “auction” on August 30th.

To add just one difference: opinions about paintings differ widely, just as taste. But most painters have their favourite public, otherwise they would die hungry (as indeed some geniuses did). They might be controversial (one of my best friends would say ‘Cointreauversial ;-) but they are at least adored by a happy few.

Seldom a judgment is seen at as “a thing of beauty”, en certainly never as ‘a joy for ever’. In most cases, no one of the parties like it, and still: what they read, is what they get. To get more and better, they must try the Appeals Painter to restore it, but there, the picture might become uglier too.

The painter of this morning along the canal just had settled, his canvas was empty. He seemed very happy to start. So we both loved our work. I certainly did, although I did it My Way. Artists always do ;-)

Wat u vast niet gemist hebt - Ce que vous n’avez certainement pas râté - You didn’t miss this one did you ???

2011 08 01 “Overlast” (Hugo Camps in ‘De Morgen’)

2011 07 29 “Les policiers doivent-ils être armés ?” (Blog Le Monde du Comm. principal honoraire de la Police Nationale, Georges Moréas)

A quote a day, keeps the doctor away ;-)

“L'application servile de la loi ne créerait pas seulement l'injustice ou l'aberration psychiatrique ; elle créerait l'illégalité"

Collectif “Mais c’est un homme” dans Le Monde de ce jour, au sujet de “la loi sur la psychiatrie entre en vigueur, dans un climat de fronde (cliquez ici).

Photo of the day:

Painting Around Bruges, this morning.

Poem of the day:

“Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,

When clouds are one cloud till the horizon,

Our thinking senses deem the sun away

And say ‘tis sunless’ and ‘there is no sun’:

And yet the very day they wrong truth by

Is of unseen sun’s effluent essence,

The very words do give themselves the lie,

The very thought of absence comes from presence”

Fernando Pessoa, Poesia Inglesa (Vertaald in het Nederlands in het werk van Maarten Asscher & August Willemsen, De Arbeiderspers 2010)

You Tube of the day:

My Way

Jogging around Bruges:

Automn

Winter

Spring

Visits of Courtrooms:

Bruges, Huyse Die Caese (ancient courthouse of the Juges d’Instruction)

Lyon, Security in old & new courts

My favourite bridges of 2010: bridges as the symbol of Justice

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